Related topics: climate change
Ice age
hideThe general term "ice age" or, more precisely, "glacial age" denotes a geological period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in an expansion of continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Within a long-term ice age, individual pulses of extra cold climate are termed "glaciations". Glaciologically, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres; by this definition we are still in an ice age (because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still exist).
More colloquially, when speaking of the last few thousand years, "the" ice age refers to the most recent colder period (or freezing period) with extensive ice sheets over the North American and Eurasian continents: in this sense, the most recent ice age peaked, in its Last Glacial Maximum about 20,000 years ago. This article will use the term ice age in the former, glaciological, sense: glacials for colder periods during ice ages and interglacials for the warmer periods.
For more information about Ice age, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
News tagged with ice age
'Super-river' formed the English Channel
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Dec 02, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of Anglo-French scientists studying sedimentary deposits in the Bay of Biscay have concluded that Britain and France were separated by a "super-river" during three periods of glaciations, ...
Supervolcano eruption -- in Sumatra -- deforested India 73,000 years ago
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Nov 23, 2009 |
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A new study provides "incontrovertible evidence" that the volcanic super-eruption of Toba on the island of Sumatra about 73,000 years ago deforested much of central India, some 3,000 miles from the epicenter, ...
After mastodons and mammoths, a transformed landscape
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Nov 19, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Roughly 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, North America's vast assemblage of large animals -- including such iconic creatures as mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, ground ...
Past regional cold and warm periods linked to natural climate drivers
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Nov 26, 2009 |
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Intervals of regional warmth and cold in the past are linked to the El Niño phenomenon and the so-called "North Atlantic Oscillation" in the Northern hemisphere's jet stream, according to a team of climate scientists. These ...
Volcanoes played pivotal role in ancient ice age, mass extinction
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Oct 26, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers here have discovered the pivotal role that volcanoes played in a deadly ice age 450 million years ago.
Long debate ended over cause, demise of ice ages -- may also help predict future
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Aug 06, 2009 |
4.4 / 5 (23) |
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Researchers have largely put to rest a long debate on the underlying mechanism that has caused periodic ice ages on Earth for the past 2.5 million years - they are ultimately linked to slight shifts in solar radiation caused ...
Peruvian glacial retreats linked to European events of Little Ice Age
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Sep 24, 2009 |
4 / 5 (5) |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study that reports precise ages for glacial moraines in southern Peru links climate swings in the tropics to those of Europe and North America during the Little Ice Age approximately ...
Europe's first farmers replaced their Stone Age hunter-gatherer forerunners
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Sep 03, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- DNA study suggests that further waves of prehistoric immigration are waiting to be discovered. Central and northern Europe's first farmers were immigrants with barely any ancestral ties to the modern population, ...
Gullies on Mars show tantalizing signs of recent water activity
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Mar 02, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Planetary geologists at Brown University have found a gully fan system on Mars that formed about 1.25 million years ago. The fan offers compelling evidence that it was formed by melt water ...
Earth's most prominent rainfall feature creeping northward
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Jul 01, 2009 |
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The rain band near the equator that determines the supply of freshwater to nearly a billion people throughout the tropics and subtropics has been creeping north for more than 300 years, probably because of ...
Life's Ancient Island in the Ice
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Oct 29, 2009 |
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During the last ice age, massive glaciers covered much of our planet. However, a region of Alaska, Siberia and the Canadian Yukon remained ice-free. This region, known as Beringia, supported unique organisms ...
Trying to spot differences in the sun
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Jun 28, 2009 |
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The sun is the focus of a deepening mystery. Solar scientists want to know: Why is the sun so quiet?
Scandinavians are descended from Stone Age immigrants
Sep 24, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Today's Scandinavians are not descended from the people who came to Scandinavia at the conclusion of the last ice age but, apparently, from a population that arrived later, concurrently with the introduction ...
3.2-Million-Year Temperature History from Tiny Fossils
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Aug 05, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- People often talk about greenhouse gases and their effect on the earth's climate as if those effects were new. But greenhouse gases have been around for hundreds of millennia, playing a key ...
Small mammals have a 'Celtic fringe' too
Sep 30, 2009 |
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The origin of the 'Celtic fringe' of genetically and culturally distinctive people in the northern and western British Isles is the source of fierce academic controversy.
